Some of the biggest investors in the cryptocurrency space have raised $45 million in a private pre-sale financing for Oasis Labs to privacy-focused smart contracts-enabled blockchain platform.

Comprised of a team of academic heavyweights and security researchers from institutions including MIT and Berkeley, Oasis Labs confirmed its $45 million fundraising to develop and launch what it
describes as ‘a privacy-first cloud computing [solution] on a blockchain’. This platform, the company adds, will be designed to ‘overcome performance, security and privacy limitations’ that have
otherwise limited the scope of blockchain applications.

The Oasis platform aims to rival popular cloud computing platforms like Amazon Web Services by enhancing privacy and security protections while ramping up their efficiency with greater
performance than current systems – ‘even for complex applications’. The startup contends the platform enables advanced privacy-sensitive services like machine learning on the blockchain.

Headed by chief executive Dawn Song, professor of computer science at UC Berkeley, the blockchain has convinced a number of prominent venture capital firms and cryptocurrency giants to back the
project.

The $45 million token pre-sale was led by Andreessen Horowitz‘s a16z in a funding raise that included Accel, Binance – the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, DCVC, Electric Capital,
Foundation Capital, Pantera, Polychain and others, including Coinbase co-founder Fred Ehrsam.

“We use a combination of trusted hardware and cryptographic techniques (such as secure multiparty computation) to enable smart contracts to compute over this encrypted data, without revealing
anything about the underlying data,” Song told TechCrunch. “This is like doing computation inside a black box, which only outputs the computation result without showing what’s inside the black
box.”
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